I hadn’t realized it, but I’ve had this blog for … more than 11 years. Yes, it’s sat largely abandoned since the summer after grad school, and I do occasionally re-commit myself to it, for at least those thirty minutes I think I have time to say something.

I feel the emptiness in those convictions at the moment. I know how my life will take over, and I won’t write, because I won’t take time to be quiet enough to think. How I’ll run on fumes and stress until I collapse, and then there’s no time. There are so many things that are missing from life just now that were a permanent fixture in 2001 when I started this blog. I was still singing regularly then. In fact, I had just been to New York on a choir trip two months before. I sang at the High Holy Days services still. The previous summer I’d gotten my first apartment. I lived alone.

There’s more reminiscing to be done here. But now it is, like it always is: I write, and life decides it’s time for me to do something else. This time, my child (nearly 4 now) has decided to lay out a picnic for us this afternoon, and has raided the picnic basket for silverware and the refrigerator for fruit.

I spend so much of my time swirling around in my head that I just don’t focus on much, and when I do, I often get distracted on the way. I am still so comfortable with the chaos that I create it if it doesn’t find me, and my online life is a reflection of that: fragmented, scattered, and, for the most part, neglected.

Apropos of nothing, as it were.

I, like so many people in this linked-in age, have come to think of relative luxuries like Internet access and smartphones (without which we lived quite comfortably, before their invention) as basic to life, if we think about them at all. They are, for many of us, assumed. Assumed to be true, present. The question isn’t “do you?”, it’s “which one?”

I was even a relatively late adopter, buying an iPhone 3 in the summer of 2009, right after the launch of the 3GS and a fortuitous bit of grandmotherly surprise money made it “affordable”.

Actually, it just paid for the hardware.

After “only” paying $30 a month for unlimited data for almost three years, I realized how much I could have used that $1,000 or so, especially if it had been applied to those pesky student loans or something of that ilk.

It should be noted that I’m composing this post on a smartphone. Ahem.

All ironic self-awareness aside, I’m hoping to cut that expense, and do something useful with it. I’ll still use the existing hardware, reduced to wifi, and probably sense little difference.

After all, a commute is easily filled with knitting projects and library books.